In the early days of radio and television, a small number of nationwide networks broadcast entertainment for contemporaneous audience consumption, thereby providing a common cultural experience shared by large segments of the population. Now, many more sources of content exist and many content subscribers have the ability to record content for time-shifted viewing or for viewing-on-demand. The ability of individual content subscribers to select content from an ever-increasing array of content has significantly diluted the cultural experience of large audiences viewing the same content simultaneously because of desire of content subscribers to consume the same content as others in their social network at substantially the same time.
Various techniques exist to facilitate the simultaneous sharing of content. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,653,545 by Redmann et al., and U.S. Pat. No. 7,518,051 by Redmann both teach a distributed musical performance system that includes a distributed transport control. The distributed musical performance system disclosed in these patents enable substantial synchronization of the execution of commands to play, pause, rewind, fast-forward, and stop media playback at each location, regardless of network latency.
Other efforts to share content include the integration by the cable television network CNN of a video feed of President Obama's inauguration with a parallel Facebook-based feed so participants could see comments made by friends in real-time. Unfortunately, not all participants enjoyed a synchronized video feed, so some comments appeared long before or long after viewing of the actual event.
One company, frog design inc now provides an application for the iPhone called “tvChatter” that uses Twitter as a background service to collect and redistribute contemporaneous commentary for live broadcasts of new television episodes. Unfortunately, content subscribers in an earlier time zone can enter comments about portions of the content net yet viewed by content subscribers in a later time, leading to complaints of “spoiling” the outcome of television programs, which can significantly detract from sharing comments on elimination-based reality shows or suspenseful dramas.
Other efforts to share content include the ability of certain gaming consoles, most notably the Microsoft Xbox 360, to implement a Netflix movie-streaming application that offers the option to “Watch with Party.” After a Netflix and Xbox Live account holder logs in, the account holder's Xbox Live avatar becomes the participant's on-screen persona. The participant can select “Start Party” and invite other, Xbox Live and Netflix subscribers currently on-line to join the party. The account holder that initiated the “party” can select movies from the regular Netflix catalog by browsing posters in the hierarchical arrangement (e.g., by theme, by genre, by rating, by similarity to other movies, etc.). Invited party members can select movies, which appear as suggestions. After selection of a suggested movie, the application performs a bandwidth test for video quality. Assuming sufficient bandwidth exists, the application launches, causing an on-screen image of a theatrical venue to appear, and the party members' avatars then enter and take seats. The movie begins playing on the screen within the simulated theatrical venue. The participants can have their corresponding avatars “emote” by selecting one of eight or so choices, in response to which the participant's avatar will make arm gesture and mime catcalls or cheers. A transport control allows the party members to pause, rewind, fast-forward, and resume playback across all the party member platforms.
Another example of content sharing includes video conferencing. Many organizations now maintain special facilities for video conferencing that offer one or more video screens and video cameras. Using such a facility, a panel of participants can “meet” with one or more participants at one or more remote sites. Such video conferencing facilities allow the sharing of presentation materials, for example Microsoft PowerPoint® slides. Further, such video conferencing facilities can include special video cameras for capturing images of physical documents to share among participants. Several vendors, including Cisco Systems, sell cameras, monitors, lighting systems, and video networking equipment to establish a video conferencing facility having the ability to exchange video and audio among other video conferencing facilities.
Cisco has also published a telepresence interoperability protocol (TIP) to improve the ability of video conferencing facilities to interoperate with each other even when using equipment from different manufacturers. The Internet Engineering Task Force now has under review a more general but competing standard “Controlling Multiple Streams for Telepresence” (CLUE).
Despite the various efforts to share content, difficulties persist. Thus, a need exists for a system, which affords simultaneous sharing of content across a distributed audience.